Sick and tired of being sick and tired

I have been away from  the blog for a couple weeks for a few reasons, the main one being a damned cold I have had and cannot shake. Winter has set in in Beijing and it is a weird desert type winter. Dry and windy and with a painful chill in the air. I was already sick and it has all made my resistence weaker and weaker. My immune system is ravaged right now. The last thing I feel like doing is trying to be witty or clever on some blog right now. Still drinking wine since my last slippage back into that world, but I will come out of it in time. I seem to long for some release from  the boredom and stress of my life here. My job has had some interesting twists and turns lately and I was very frustrated for a time but am resigning myself to the so called system here, which is something I am not used to. It is a system where students who never attend class or take tests are moved along into high level English course when they cannot even tell you what they did last night or what they had for lunch earlier in the day. It is all around money and appeasing those who have paid in adavnce for the certificate and are going through motions to simply pick it up later. In the meantime they sleep all day in the dorms and have a great time at their parents expense, with the knowledge that they have to do absolutely nothing and will still "succeed." For many teachers it is frustrating, as well as it is for the students who show up everyday and struggle with higher levels of a complicated language like English. Well, the Good Lord will strike them all blind in the end I am sure.

I have been really pessimistic lately. Back to my nihilistic comfort zone. I have come to accept that I believe in God, but I realize I feel God is cold and impersonal. Like nature itself God is blind brute fact and distance. I feel myself moving in odd directions with my philosophies and beliefs. They are always in the front of my mind now and I have no books to research my growing list of questions. There is no available liteature in China on any of this really. Not in the bookstores at any rate, maybe through other ex-pats or over the net. I want to explore some of this in the categories of Philosophy, Aphorisms and Gibberish as well as the psuedo-autobiographical Commentarius Perpetuus. I have not abandoned those type of writings but lately I am not able to do it. My head hurts constantly and I am worn out. Still dealing with insomnia and this blasted shoulder and arm problem. I will admit that all of this colors my mood and theologies and all that, so in a week or two when my head is not cracking apart and I have stopped sneezing wads of blood I may have an entirely new attitude. Lets see.

11:29 AM - 12/5/2005 - post comment

beijing

My God it sounds difficult there in Beijing! I hope I never get sent there.

Anonymous - 1:53 PM - 12/5/2005

God

Your problem is your lack of lit. Hit me up with your new address man so that I can get you the hook-up. Do you really think that God could be evil? But would'nt he then no longer be God? I find the possibility of an evil entity existing from all eternity unfoundable. If such a being as God exists then he must by his nature be good. I'm sure Aquinas got into this... But then I know a number of people who can't get past the fact that Adam and Eve sinned. Well either God could create robots or he could create persons free to love him. And if they're truly free, then they can sin. They were not pre-destined to sin although God knew that they would. The nature of evil is a privation of good I belive Aquinas says. In a certain sense then evil is just an empty vapor or something like that. Even some of the angels sinned, but their choice was different than ours, as they saw things perfectly clearly, which is why their choice is irrevocable despite what that stupid movie The Prophecy says. It seems that in general all of the ancients when examing the situation of evil in the world, came to the conclusion that it must be man's fault some how or another. It's not hard to understand why Adam sinned. The explanation is no farther away than the mystery of sin in ones own heart.



-Soap Box Jobe

Anonymous - 1:28 PM - 12/6/2005

Sickness and death

Sorry to hear you're sick and about your shoulder. Try to be thankful that it's not H5N1 at least. You know Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich the great inspiration for The Passion of Christ movie wrote about how (and it's portrayed well in the movie) Christ's right shoulder became dislocated during the passion, and how it caused him such great pain. The way a Catholic would handle shoulder pain would be to offer it up for sinners or something like that and try to identify with the sufferings of Jesus. I think St. Gertrude wrote alot about that particular suffering of Christ. I used to sleep on my right side at night and that same joint would oftentimes detach itself (I would literally sink an inch deeper into the mattress after I felt and heard the pop) and then it would bother me for days. Suffering is terrible, and to think that every Catholic has to vow to die rather than deny the faith before being recieved into the church. When I had strep-throat man I thought that was a martyrdom.

Anonymous - 1:53 PM - 12/6/2005